For many products and/or services a customer or subscriber desires that a financial charge for the product/service be satisfied or paid from one or more of accounts, e.g., asset accounts owned by the customer or authorized for the customer's use. The debiting of the appropriate accounts, or reserving of assets in the appropriate accounts, is generally handled by a charging system.
In today's financial climate, successful companies are very cost aware. This includes employees' use of employer's telecommunication services. For example, when using mobile broadband when roaming there is a very high cost for the usage. The high cost makes it even more important to charge the cost to the correct account.
Today there are systems that allow an employer/company to set strict rules for telecommunication use, e.g., to be financially prudent, the company can carry only the cost for calls inside a virtual private network, for example. However, the strict rule does not suit all companies/employers due to the nature of business.
Therefore, some companies employ a technique known as prefix dialing in order to allocate financial responsibility to calls. That is, some contemporary charging systems support shared accounts, e.g., the ability of a same subscriber or customer to use both a personal account and a company account by permitting the subscriber to begin a call with a certain prefix number or the like which serves to select which of plural possible accounts is to be used. However, such an up-front technique such as prefix dialing has considerable impact on the network and there are no standardized solutions to accommodate the technique. Moreover, it is not very user-friendly way of communicating with a subscriber. In general, current methods used to allocate charges before session setup are generally not sufficient and do not work for all services.
In some situations the account selection (e.g., between a personal account and a company account) is statically configured. In other situations a network attempts to deduce the nature of the telecommunications use and thus select an appropriate account based on information provided to or detected by the network. But neither such static personalized configurations or network-deduced account selection is desirable since often only the subscriber/user best knows the reason for the usage, and therefore how best to allocate the cost for the service at a specific point in time.
Paying for content using a mobile phone is an example of a situation in which user account selection is needed. A preconfigured account selection or network account selection routine is not optimum for determining whether such use is appropriate to charge to an employer or the employee. For example, if a person downloads mobile content while traveling on a subway, it may be difficult for anyone other than the person who downloads to know whether the travel is for business or private purposes, and hence whether the download is personal or for business. Even for applications such as mobile phone applications purchased from an application store or the like, it may be difficult to ascertain whether the application has private or professional usages.